'What do you want?' he said in a low tone, his voice confessing his defeat. 'If she is not here, I do not know where she is.'
'That is for you,' Sir George answered with a grim coolness that astonished Mr. Fishwick. 'It is not I who will hang if aught happen to her.'
Again there was silence. Then in a voice choked with rage Mr. Dunborough cried, 'But if I do not know?'
'The worse for you,' said Sir George. He was sorely tempted to put the muzzle of a pistol to the other's head and risk all. But he fancied that he knew his man, and that in this way only could he be effectually cowed; and he restrained himself.
'She should be here--that is all I know. She should have been here,' Mr. Dunborough continued sulkily, 'at eight.'
'Why here?'
'The fools would not take her through Chippenham without me. Now you know.'
'It is ten, now.'
'Well, curse you,' the younger man answered, flaring up again, 'could I help it if my horse fell? Do you think I should be sitting here to be rough-ridden by you if it were not for this?' He raised his right arm, or rather his shoulder, with a stiff movement; they saw that the arm was bound to his side. 'But for that she would be in Bristol by now,' he continued disdainfully, 'and you might whistle for her. But, Lord, here is a pother about a college-wench!'
'College-wench, sir?' the lawyer cried scarcely controlling his indignation. 'She is Sir George Soane's cousin. I'd have you know that!'
'And my promised wife,' Sir George said, with grim-ness.
Dunborough cried out in his astonishment. 'It is a lie!' he said.
'As you please,' Sir George answered.
At that, a chill such as he had never known gripped Mr. Dunborough's heart. He had thought himself in an unpleasant fix before; and that to escape scot free he must eat humble pie with a bad grace. But on this a secret terror, such as sometimes takes possession of a bold man who finds himself helpless and in peril seized on him. Given arms and the chance to use them, he would have led the forlornest of hopes, charged a battery, or fired a magazine. But the species of danger in which he now found himself--with a gallows and a silk rope in prospect, his fate to be determined by the very scoundrels he had hired--shook even his obstinacy. He looked about him; Sir George's servant had come up and was waiting a little apart.
Mr. Dunborough found his lips dry, his throat husky. 'What do you want?' he muttered, his voice changed. 'I have told you all I know. Likely enough they have taken her back to get themselves out of the scrape.'
'They have not,' said the lawyer. 'We have come that way, and must have met them.'
'They may be in Chippenham?'
'They are not. We have inquired.'
'Then they must have taken this road. Curse you, don't you see that I cannot get out of my saddle to look?' he continued ferociously.
'They have gone this way. Have you any devil's shop--any house of call down the road?' Sir George asked, signing to the servant to draw nearer.
'Not I.'
'Then we must track them. If they dared not face Chippenham, they will not venture through Devizes. It is possible that they are making for Bristol by cross-roads. There is a bridge over the Avon near Laycock Abbey, somewhere on our right, and a road that way through Pewsey Forest.'
'That will be it,' cried Mr. Dunborough, slapping his thigh. 'That is their game, depend upon it.'
Sir George did not answer him, but nodded to the servant. 'Go on with the light,' he said. 'Try every turning for wheels, but lose no time. This gentleman will accompany us, but I will wait on him.'
The man obeyed quickly, the lawyer going with him. The other two brought up the rear, and in that order they started, riding in silence. For a mile or more the servant held the road at a steady trot; then signing to those behind him to halt, he pulled up at the mouth of a by-road leading westwards from the highway. He moved the light once or twice across the ground, and cried that the wheels had gone that way; then got briskly to his saddle and swung along the lane at a trot, the others following in single file, Sir George last.
So far they had maintained a fair pace. But the party had not proceeded a quarter of a mile along the lane before the trot became a walk. Clouds had come over the face of the moon; the night had grown dark. The riders were no longer on the open downs, but in a narrow by-road, running across wastes and through thick coppices, the ground sloping sharply to the Avon. In one place the track was so closely shadowed by trees as to be as dark as a pit. In another it ran, unfenced, across a heath studded with water-pools, whence the startled moor-fowl squattered up unseen. Everywhere they stumbled: once a horse fell. Over such ground, founderous and scored knee-deep with ruts, it was plain that no wheeled carriage could move at speed; and the pursuers had this to cheer them. But the darkness of the night, the dreary glimpses of wood and water, which met the eye when the moon for a moment emerged, the solitude of this forest tract, the muffled tread of the horses' feet, the very moaning of the wind among the trees, suggested ideas and misgivings which Sir George strove in vain to suppress. Why had the scoundrels gone this way? Were they really bound for Bristol? Or for some den of villainy, some thieves' house in the old forest?
At times these fears stung him out of all patience, and he cried to the man with the light to go faster, faster! Again, the whole seemed unreal, and the shadowy woods and gleaming water-pools, the stumbling horses, the fear, the danger, grew to be the creatures of a disordered fancy. It was an immense joy to him when, at the end of an hour, the lawyer cried, 'The road! the road!' and one by one the riders emerged with grunts of relief on a sound causeway. To make sure that the pursued had nowhere evaded them, the tracks of the chaise-wheels were sought and found, and forward the four went again. Presently they plunged through a brook, and this passed, were on Laycock bridge before they knew it, and across the Avon, and mounting the slope on the other side by Laycock Abbey.
There were houses abutting on the road here, black overhanging masses against a grey sky, and the riders looked, wavered, and drew rein. Before any spoke, however, an unseen shutter creaked open, and a voice from the darkness cried, 'Hallo!'
Sir George found speech to answer. 'Yes,' he said, 'what is it?' The lawyer was out of breath, and clinging to the mane in sheer weariness.
'Be you after a chaise driving to the devil?'
'Yes, yes,' Sir George answered eagerly. 'Has it passed, my man?'
'Ay, sure, Corsham way, for Bath most like, I knew 'twould be followed. Is't a murder, gentlemen?'
'Yes,' Sir George cried hurriedly, 'and worse! How far ahead are they?'
'About half an hour, no more, and whipping and spurring as if the old one was after them. My old woman's sick, and the apothecary from--'
'Is it straight on?'
'Ay, to be sure, straight on--and the apothecary from Corsham, as I was saying, he said, said he, as soon as he saw her--'
But his listeners were away again; the old man's words were lost in the scramble and clatter of the horses' shoes as they sprang forward. In a moment the stillness and the dark shapes of the houses were exchanged for the open country, the rush of wind in the riders' faces, and the pounding of hoofs on the hard road. For a brief while the sky cleared and the moon shone out, and they rode as easily as in the day. At the pace at which they were moving Sir George calculated